


It's Not About Soulmates

by sinkingsidewalks



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-17
Updated: 2018-09-17
Packaged: 2019-07-13 17:00:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16022165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinkingsidewalks/pseuds/sinkingsidewalks
Summary: When you've met the love of your life, their name appears as ink, somewhere on your skin - sometimes, mostly. That's what's said at least, it's not super clear.





	It's Not About Soulmates

**Author's Note:**

> I've been playing around with second person the last couple days and this is what came of it. I'm around on tumblr @sinkingsidewalks (Also, if you're looking for a really good soulmate AU, then read falsettodrop's Arrow's Wound because _that's_ a really good soulmate AU)  
>  This is a work of complete fiction.

Written on the skin of his ribs, between the fourth and fifth ones down on the left side are two S’s. You see it for the first time the summer you’re thirteen and he’s not fifteen yet when he pulls off his shirt to jump into Lake Huron on your first weekend off from both school and skating that year. 

They’re still milky, not quite all the way to the inky black that will eventually brand his skin, still in progress. The second one is missing half the bottom curl. But it’s there, wedged into his skinny frame that’s rapidly bulking up now that you’re living and training in Waterloo full time. 

It makes you think too much about the way his tongue curls around your name. About the way you can almost taste those S’s when he shouts it from the lake. How they bounce, each in its own syllable, off the glass-like surface of the water, and how they crawl together under your skin when he whispers for your attention on the ice. You’ve always liked the shortened version better. 

The last night before you head back to the city your dad builds a fire on the beach. The wood is too wet from a storm the night before and it smokes heavily, the whirlwind from the lake blowing it into your faces no matter where around it you sit. 

Jordan and the friend she brought with her bail out first, back up to the house where they’ll crawl into bed whispering things they won’t tell you about yet. Then your parents leave, two old tin buckets of water staying in their place, your dad with a word of warning to _make sure it’s all the way out._

It’s long past dark. Scott has his elbows propped on his knees, staring into the flames while you’re staring at him. Or, you’re staring at his ribs. Wondering if the ink has grown, wondering how long it’s been there. You want to put your hand on his skin over the mark and see if you can draw it out, then trace over your own handwriting with the tip of one finger. 

You didn’t think it would ever happen. You’d written it off years ago, when you realized that you wanted things like gold medals and Olympic games and him. 

He notices you staring, you’re not exactly being subtle, and gets up. “Come on, it’s late.”

He tips the bucket out steadily over the flames, which hiss and smoke and die, then he keeps pouring over blackened wood. The stream catches every glowing ember and snuffs the life out of it. You exchange buckets and he dumps that one over too. A river clears the circle enclosure of rocks and runs back towards the lake.

You walk back up to the cottage, each with an empty bucket in your hand. 

“Night Tess,” he whispers in the hallway where you split off. You’re not allowed to sleep in the same room anymore which you think is pretty stupid. 

When you change out of your clothes, you stand in front of the floor length mirror in only your underwear and turn. The orange glow of the lamp casts you in a circle of light just like the fire did and you stare and stare into the mirror. 

Your own skin is still completely bare.

 

He never brings it up but you don’t expect him to. There’s training and competitions, and something like names seems childish. Like it’s part of the fairy tales you used to be told as bedtime stories. 

You don’t doubt it though, not until you overhear him on his way into the rink one day. He’s crowing to Charlie about the girl he made out with at your last competition, a pairs skater, who has actually texted him back. 

“What’s her name?” Charlie asks. You glare at them both, already on the ice, and tap your bare wrist at Scott as if there were a watch there. He’s late, again.

“Jess,” he says and it makes perfect sense. 

Of course it’s not you.

 

“It’s not about soulmates,” your aunt says, tipsy in that honest kind of way one Thanksgiving when it’s too late for everyone to be hanging around still. She’s got two thick lines of tattoo scored over ‘Henry’ on her forearm, the black ink from the needle three shades lighter than the natural mark below it.

It’s 2000 and everyone else tells you that you’re too young to be worrying about this stuff yet. You and Jordan hang off her every word. 

“It’s just who you’re stupid enough to fall for.” 

 

You’re twenty-three and he kisses you in the abandoned hallway of a rink, the taste of a silver medal on both your tongues, when you allow yourself to think for the first time that by now the name should be fully formed. 

His is carved into your shin, next to surgery scars that will also never fade. Thick and black, like he’d written it there with a sharpie. The top loop of the _S_ bigger than the bottom and the lines crossing the _T_ ’s bleeding together. Just like he wrote his name at the top of every school paper for years. 

It appeared all at once, when you woke up after surgery. The nurse checking your bandages laughed at your double-take, spouting something about anesthesia letting the subconscious mind take over. She said you were lucky to have found your other half so soon and you didn’t tell her how you’ve felt the burning under your skin there for long enough that in the beginning you mistook your injury for it. 

There was a cardboard cup of hot chocolate your mother would never have smuggled in for you sitting stone cold on the table but you didn’t see Scott for another two months. 

Sometimes you wonder if the universe will score the whole thing down your leg before either of you get your shit together about it. 

But his should be fully formed too now, and he’s still made this decision. To kiss you, but never in the open. To fuck you, but only in the darkness. 

You don’t know what it means. Whether it is yours, and your careers have to come first. Or if it’s not yours, but he loves you anyways. It has to be yours, because he didn’t meet Jess until later, but it can’t be, because it showed up years after you met. The logic only goes in circles. 

You understand though. And you let him make his choice. There are so many ways to love someone. You can’t demand all of them from him. 

Most of the time you keep a sheet bandage plastered over yours. You’re not ashamed, per say. It’s not like the stories you’ve heard, when the wrong kind of name shows up and people lose pieces of their families, their communities. It’s nothing like that. 

It’s just that you don’t want it showing through your tights. Or for the other girls in the locker room to see it when you’re changing. Or for Scott to be able to feel it burning against your skin. 

Sometimes, in the shower, you scrub at it. First with the tips of your fingers, then with a loofa, then digging your nails across the skin, bumping over surgery scars as you go. It should bleed away, like ink out of drowned paper. But it doesn’t.

By the time Jess is exchanged for Cass you’ve given up on all your excuses. You wonder if the universe hasn’t made a mistake. 

 

When you’re in sixth grade you get invited to a sleepover birthday party and miraculously, you’re free enough to attend. 

It’s you, Sarah, who’s birthday it is, and eight other girls from your class. You don’t know any of them particularly well, but Sarah was your partner for the Science Fair and you got along well enough. So you pack up your sleeping bag, tell your mom twice you’ll be fine, and go. 

After pizza and movies, it gets dark out and you all huddle in a circle in Sarah’s basement rec room. The TV is on but muted and glowing the only light into the room. The conversation, as most do, turns to names. 

“It can’t be anyone in our class,” one girl says when another starts matching everyone up with boys. “We would have gotten the marks already.”

“It can take time.” 

“My mom knew my dad for two years before his name ever showed up for her.”

“Well, we’re too young anyway.”

“Someone in my sister’s class already has his.”

“Yeah, but she’s in _high school_ , isn’t she?”

“Is it someone in his class? That would be so cute.”

“Well it has to be someone he’s met.”

“Shh!” Sarah hisses, staring up at the ceiling. Footsteps move on the floor above but the door to the basement doesn’t open. 

“I think Eric’s mine,” someone says wistfully. 

Sarah snorts, then turns to get you into the conversation. “What about you, Tess? You have a boyfriend, don’t you?”

You shake your head, biting on the inside of your cheek to try to stop yourself from blushing. “He’s not my boyfriend. Besides, I don’t really think it’s all that important if you end up with a name or not.”

“But what about-“

You stop listening. 

Melanie, who is tiny and quiet and shy like you is beat red across her cheeks and stares at her feet. You sit beside her in class so whenever Mrs. Walker doesn’t assign partners, you pair up. She’s wearing long sleeves even though it’s May and when you think about it, you’ve never seen her in a t-shirt. 

“Are you awake?” Melanie whispers once everyone else is asleep. The two of you are on a mattress tucked into the corner by the sofa. 

“Yeah,” you say back. No one else in the room stirs. A light on in the stairway spills in enough for you to see her. 

“Do you really think it doesn’t mean anything?”

“I don’t know.”

Melanie pauses, then whispers again, “Can you keep a secret?”

“Yeah,” you say, because you want to know. 

Melanie pulls up the sleeve of her pajama shirt and below her elbow on the inside of her forearm is a neatly printed K and the shadowy line of the next letter which could be a _L_ or a _T_ or an _I_. You stare hard at it, somehow expecting it to disappear, like a spot in your vision after looking too hard at the sun. But it doesn’t waver. 

You’ve never seen one before, neither of your parents ever got one. 

“Woah.” You say, because it feels like the thing you should. Rarely, do people end up marked so young.

“I was grading papers for Mrs. Walker,” she whispers to you, excited and afraid. “It matches someone called Kim, she’s in the other class I think.”

“Did it hurt?” you ask, because you heard that it does sometimes. 

“A little, kinda like carpet burn.”

“Woah.” You say, because you’re not sure what else there is. 

 

A month after the two of you get home from Russia a phone call wakes you in the middle of the night. You pick it up because it’s Scott calling. 

He’s at a bar, he says, slurs really, he can’t drive home. Please will you pick him up? You get out of bed because it’s Scott calling. 

When you get there he’s so stumbling drunk he hangs onto your shoulders and goes anywhere you push him to be. It scares something deep inside you, the knowledge that he’s so far gone and that he must have done that on purpose. He won’t remember any of this in the morning and you feel like you should say something about it but you’re also not sure it’s your place anymore. 

It’s easy enough at least to get him into your car. You don’t know where he’s living at the moment and you sure as hell aren’t going to let Alma see him like this so you take him back to your house. 

You put him in your shower because his skin is suspiciously sticky but you’re not totally sure he won’t accidentally drown himself so you sit on the closed lid of the toilet to wait. He strips without preamble, tossing his clothes in the direction of your laundry basket. They miss by a mile. 

It’s still there on his ribs, _ss_. The bottom of the second one has finished and they’re a deep sinking black but it’s still only the two letters. You don’t know what to make of it. 

“They’re yours.” He slurs when he notices you staring. “Of course they’re for yours. Who else could they be?”

You don’t answer. The sick feeling at the back of your throat grows even though you weren’t the one drinking and you shove it away. Instead, you turn the shower on and he hollers at the shock of freezing water. 

“Tesssssa,” he whines as you steer him towards your guest room. “I wanna cuddle.”

You shake your head and pull starched white sheets down for him. “If you puked on me I’d have to hate you.” There are really only so many things you can forgive. 

He crawls into your bed later anyways. 

You’re not asleep when he slides under the blankets and curls around your back. His breath is on your throat and you want to tell him to get lost, to let you sleep, but you can’t. You never can. 

His fingers crawl down your leg like _criss-cross-applesauce_ that you did on each other’s backs when you were little and still skated in Ilderton. They trail over your thigh, skirt past your knee bones, and then he starts counting the scars down your shins. Touching each one and pausing there. Even in the darkness, under the blankets, he doesn’t hesitate to find the next. 

You didn’t cover it up when you got out of the shower earlier, or when you left to pick him up and you feel his intake of breath against your back when he realizes. His hand stops, right over the mark, even though it can’t be felt on your skin. 

He _knows_ , you know that, even though you’ve never seen him see it. Sometimes, when you were training still, he’d find any excuse to touch you there, and press his fingers in over the bandage. Like he wanted to leave a bruise, like he wanted to add to how he’s already marked you. 

He goes back to touching your scars and whispers, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” You reply but he’s already asleep. 

 

Training in Montreal is going better than you could have possibly hoped for it to. You wait, late one evening, in the hallway at the rink after what you can only describe as a damn good practice, for him to come out of the changing rooms. It’s been almost ten minutes and you’re getting hungry so you wind back down the halls looking for what could be holding him up. 

The door to the dressing room is open, but it’s not Scott’s voice spilling free from it so you pause at the doorway. 

“How long has that been forming.” Patrice points at his ribs. The _ss_ is still there, but there are new shadows around it you tell yourself could be the _e_ and the _a_. 

You can see him through the mirror and you know you shouldn’t be listening. There are still some boundaries, but you suddenly need to know the answer more than you did when you were thirteen. You’re a fly on the wall; if he looked, he would see only you. 

Scott laughs humourlessly. “Started when I was about thirteen. It’s been pretty slow going.”

Patch nods. “And Tessa?”

“The- Yeah, she has- On her leg, shin. The-“ Scott stumbles around, you know instinctually he’s never had this conversation with anyone before, just like you haven’t. He sighs. “You’ve seen.”

Patch shrugs noncommittally. “We thought maybe it was only scars from her surgery that she wanted covered.”

Scott breathes out hard. “No.”

“And it’s?” 

“Shit, yeah. Yeah, it’s my name.”

You’ve never said it out loud before.

Patch shrugs again, no judgement. “Sometimes they mean everything.” He pulls up his sleeve to show Scott the _M_ you know is there for Marie-France. “But others mean hardly anything at all.” Then he tugs on his pant leg, revealing a different name in more of the same black ink on his ankle. “You still have a choice, Scott.”

You turn on your heel and scurry away to the parking lot before you can hear his response. 

 

Right before you move to Canton, your mom gives you another version of _The Talk_ , except this one isn’t about sex. It’s about the lines that you expect, but still aren’t drawing themselves onto your skin.

“No one really knows what it means,” Kate says, sitting beside you on your bed. The room is still mostly decorated for your pre-teen self from before you went to Waterloo and ever since you left it hasn’t quite felt like you still properly fit into it. 

Kate says, “Just because you don’t have someone’s name, doesn’t mean they aren’t important to you. And just because you do, doesn’t mean you’re meant to be together.”

You’ve been freakishly aware of your own emotions since you were seven years old. There’s never been any doubt in your mind that you love him. What you’re meant to do with that love is an entirely different question. 

 

In Montreal, after training he goes to his apartment to shower, then walks the two floors down to yours to make you both dinner. It’s a comfortable habit. Domesticity in its most basic form because it’s nice to have him around. 

You get out of your own shower one day and he’s already there. Summer is sticking to your skin in your bedroom, the AC in your building can’t quite pull the humidity from the air. You throw on shorts and an old t-shirt and leave your room to find him singing along to some pop on the radio with the fridge open. 

“Hey T, do you know if you’re out of-“ He stares when he turns around, when his eyes glance down to your shins and get stuck there. 

You’ve been trying not to cover it up so much anymore. At least not when you’re home. But this is maybe the first time he’s seen it since all those years ago when it appeared. He rubs one hand over his ribs subconsciously.

You still don’t know where you stand with it all. You haven’t spoken about it since that drunken night after Sochi. Which you still don’t even know if he remembers. 

There’s a long moment of silence that hangs in the air, then he moves. He shuts off the stove with a decisive click and takes two big steps across the kitchen to stand in front of you. 

“Tessa,” he says, carefully moulding each letter in his mouth. You feel anything but twenty-six. 

Your name is a wave, crashing over you both on the beach thirteen years ago, threatening to drown you. The song spilling over the radio is every drive you’ve ever taken together. His hand on your cheek feels like twenty-one and waking up from a second surgery. 

“Tess, can I kiss you?”

You’re nodding before he’s even finished the question, one hand digging into the back of his hair. 

 

One morning you wake to find your phone filled up with notifications. They spill over every social media app you’ve got downloaded and the chaos is so intense you can’t tell where it stems from.

Eventually, you find the cause. There’s a somewhat blurry picture of Scott, standing with a group of guys on a field of grass with a soccer ball and his shirt off. 

And it’s there, perfectly visible. _Tessa_ , scored into his skin. Sometimes, if you squint, you think you can see the beginning of a _J_ forming too for your middle name. 

_Oh my god_. The comments say. _They’re soulmates._

_I wonder where hers is?_

_OH THANK FUCK!_

_Of course they’re soulmates they’re perfect for each other._

_I knew it I knew it I knew it!_

_Ohmygod_. The comments say. _They’re **Soulmates.**_

 

It doesn’t come up again until you’re doing promotion for a tour, and the host of whatever show you’re on has a copy of the picture printed out. She holds it up with a smile too close to biting and the cameras roll onward. 

“It’s not about soulmates.” You say, the old memory a sour taste under your tongue that you shove away. The studio lights burn hot and Scott looks at you, startled that you’ve said anything at all. “It’s just about who you choose to hold on to.”


End file.
